After weeks of shitposts over Twitter that were challenges to Andrew Scheer's authority, Maxime Bernier finally pulled the plug on Thursday and left the Conservative caucus, just as they were about to meet in Halifax for the party's policy convention.  Bernier stated that the current Conservative party had changed that he hadn't and that the party was too "intellectually and morally corrupt" to be reformed, hence he was going to leave and forge his own political movement.  Bully for him, but one immediately gets the sense that he may not quite understand the gravity of what he's decided to take on, or the fact that he may have misjudged his own capabilities.

Now, I think that Bernier made some very good and salient points while he burnt his bridges in the Centre Block's Charles Lynch press theatre on Thursday afternoon the Conservative party no longer stands for free market conservative ideas, and that it largely stands for platitudes designed to be largely inoffensive in order to try and be "Harper with a smile," while going around lying to Canadians and shitposting their own memes over social media in the name of an amorphous "positive Conservative vision" that is focused on people's petty desire to save a few cents at the pumps at the expense of the planet's climate.  However, the things that Bernier was fixated on in his farewell speech were things that are going to be very hard to build and sustain a movement on.

Take his bugaboo of supply management.  While it may be a policy that offends the economic sensibilities of many Canadians, it's been so skilfully marketed by the dairy cartel in this country that people equate it with product safety and feel-good images of family farms that it'll be hard to dislodge from people's imagination, even on the promise of cheaper milk and cheese.  Even there, that promise may be oversold given that the anecdotal experience of Canadians who've lived in the US can point to the fact that they didn't save any money on dairy while living south of the border.  That, and the fact that ending the system will be an expensive proposition as buying out the quotas will cost billions of dollars, if Australia's experience is anything to go by.

Bernier's other points in his kiss-off were around corporate welfare and equalization payments.  While the former may be anathema to most fiscal conservatives, its value lies more in electoral politics, which is why his pitch will be of limited utility.  Likewise, while the distorted picture of equalization may be a popular rallying cry in some parts of the country (and it's one that doesn't reflect the reality of the program), it's a necessary part of life for some parts of the country.  Try to tell regions of the country that you're going to remove the subsidies to their key industries, or that you're turning off the equalization taps because Alberta is sore that they make more money than everyone else, and you may find yourself unelectable.

This is why I have my doubts about the future of Bernier's yet-to-be-named political party.  Compromise is the lifeblood of politics, and it's why we have very little ability to sustain ideologically-driven parties in this country.  Our system favours big tents that moderate extremes, and that has generally served us well as a country.  If Bernier is trying to launch a more ideological version of a conservative party, then he's got a tough hill to climb, because achieving power will mean compromise at some point, and you have to wonder if in the end, Bernier's acolytes will be better served following him, or keeping within the Conservative fold.

Not to mention, we still don't have a grasp on just what Bernier's ideology is.  While he mentions these three particular points of policy difference, is that enough to build a movement on?  While Bernier espouses libertarian values, are there enough people in this country, busily wanking themselves off to the works of Ayn Rand, to launch a campaign infrastructure in less than a year?  Do those libertarian ideals mesh with his recent conversion to winking at the country's white nationalists about diversity and "extreme multiculturalism" (examples of which he refused to point to when asked at his press conference)?  After all, Bernier's commitment to those libertarian ideals during the early part of his leadership campaign, when he showed up at Pride parades around the country to declare that he didn't care who they loved because freedom, didn't really hold with his sudden conversion to the cult of Jordan Peterson and his paranoia about people being forced to utter strange pronouns or face jail time (which, I will remind you, is nowhere in the law that enshrines the rights of gender diverse people).  Just what is the ideology of shitposting on Twitter anyway?  Will he simply try to be just another populist figure, pitting his own brand of populist noise versus Scheer's?

And now the question of just who Bernier can draw to his nascent team, if he ever gets around to naming it.  Sure, Bernier has a dedicated fan base around the country who has recently shown its willingness to donate to paying off his leadership debts, but can he sustain that to create a viable political party that can create 338 riding associations and fielding an equal number of candidates?  Sure, his leadership campaign attracted a lot of names and attention, but I fear that Bernier may have underestimated the number of people who were pure opportunists, who saw him as a winnable candidate in a field of duds.  Now that people see a chance for a Conservative win with Scheer (owing more to the Liberals' own record of own-goals and failures to communicate than to Scheer's subdued charisma or the paucity of ideas he's presenting), I suspect that those same opportunists are not likely to follow Bernier to his own private fiefdom, which will be a crippling blow to his ability to organize and that's what he's going to have to do.  Given his history of poor political judgment, it's going to be tough for him to pull off the kind of logistical feat that a national party capable of fielding 338 candidates entails it's something that won't be accomplished through social media alone.  Can he pull some votes away from Scheer?  Maybe.  But the odds of him creating anything lasting are certainly stacked against him.

Photo Credit: Jeff Burney, Loonie Politics